Asian Window

July and August are pilgrimage months in Kashmir. Will global warming — and terrorism — make things too hot at journey’s end? Peter Manseau in Search Magazine:

Pilgrims going to Amarnath cave

Amarnath cave ice formation and (inset) classic example of a stone Shiva symbol

Long before people called themselves Muslims or Hindus, long before they fought and died over these or any labels and turned a paradise into what Bill Clinton, Salman Rushdie and others have called “the most dangerous place in the world,” water dripped and froze inside the Amarnath Cave at the heart of Kashmir.

It began as a trickle, but became a steady stream. Water leaked through as the July sun hit the Himalayan snowpack above, only to turn to ice again as is entered the 135-foot high grotto that maintains a wintry temperature deep into the summer. There the water gathered to form first a frozen stick, then a frozen wall, then something more mysterious, a six-foot-tall mound of ice that seemed almost ready to walk away. As July turned to August and the cave temperature rose, the ice formation melted, as they do. But the next year it formed again; it always did.

It’s impossible to say how long the ice came and went hidden within the Amarnath Cave before people happened along to give it meaning. According to legend, a Muslim shepherd named Malik discovered it in the twelfth century. Kashmir at the time was an interreligious land even at the individual level. It was not unusual that this follower of Islam had spent a fair amount of time in Hindu temples, and so when he saw the column of ice-slightly taller than it was wide, with its rounded top like the crown of a man’s head-he knew just what it looked like: A lingam, the phallic symbol of the god Shiva, Hindu deity of creation and destruction.

[Published six times a year in Washington, DC, SEARCH is a non-profit, non-partisan, non-sectarian magazine exploring the intersection of science, religion, and culture.]

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